I was wondering if there was anyone out there that has dealt with online impersonations via facebook or other social websites. I have had someone make a fake facebook account using my real name or shortened forms. This happened to me for the first time last year and the person didn't block me on facebook so it was easy for me to come across it and reported it personally and got tons of my friends who have facebook to do the same. Months later I was either blocked or the page was taken down. This Friday my friend texted me asking me if I had two facebook accounts which i dont. He sent me the link and i couldnt see it because the person either learned from last time or was a smarter person then the last and blocked me so I wouldnt find out. Through a friends account i saw about 30 of my modeling pictures up (even some i dont have posted anywhere and some i had posted but took down since back when i was 19 years old). The page was labelled as a fan page and the person posted lots of things on online anti-bullying - hyprocrite. Stealing identity is a form of abuse. So i once again got lots of my friends to report it because this time i couldn't (you have to be able to view the person to report them on facebook - being blocked I couldn't). Eventually the page was not publically viewable after the person got a few nasty emails confronting them from my modeling friends but the person made it a private account bc i contacts a few of her/his followers (200
of them) and they told me it was still active.

So after my long story - i was wondering if there was any advice or other stories of this happening to others and how they dealt with it. Anything would be helpful right now bc i can see them just changing the name more and making a new account. Very frustrating.

I had someone create a few fake social media profiles of me back in the day. What bothered me the most was their poor use of the English language (god forbid someone think my spelling was that awful!) I contacted the sites and the user directly and had them all shut down within a week. The creepiest part was that they had also created a fake profile of my best friend and my boyfriend at the time to make it seem legit. They also made a fake photographer profile (from Germany) who was claiming he had taken the majority of my photos on a shoot in Germany (where I've never been). The actual photos in question were taken in Toronto and New York. It was quite odd.

wow thats determination on their port! Creating profiles of your friend/bf!? Its like they wanted to live your life. That is super messed up. I wish i could have contacted this person but i was blocked. I hope that person has left you alone by now.

It has happened to me a few times. Actually back on Myspace it happened 4 times that I found out about. I had to report it enough times that they made me send in a pic of me holding a sign with the date and my drivers license. Then they made a verified account. Same happened with Facebook a few years ago and they deleted the fake one and my profile which had a lot of friends etc and with no response from their corporate. I almost didn't make a new one. So far on mm only one time that I am aware of someone tried to be me, but it was reported to the mods and they were great about handling it quickly.

Not exactly the same thing, but my boyfriend runs a clothing line and used to be pretty big on Myspace (loads of friends) and we found a guy using all his photos on a Facebook profile, trying to tell his friends that he owned the clothing line, that my boyfriend was him etc. Was really weird. We got all the original images taken down but couldn't get his profile gone. Then he reappeared a few months later and was posting images of both of us together (images I'd put on my profile but my account is friends only) but one of them was my boyfriends profile picture. I found this extremely creepy and tried to get the profile taken down, as well as my boyfriend did. His profile (still!) remained up, but he started posting images of himself instead.
The really weird thing for me was once we saw what he looked like, he'd cut and dyed his hair just like my boyfriend :s

TL;DR: Persistence will make people like this stop, but there's nothing stopping creepy people being REALLY creepy.

the similar behavior is common among the psychopaths with so called "worshipper complex" who do not know how to attract attention of their "goddess(es)". they could be under impression that they do you "a favor". they could be even more disturbing in the future and/or potentially even more dangerous if you don't "recognize" them as a "special friend" or sole mate of some sort. some of them could be of "never enough" kind.

you can try to analyze the tiniest details of the way a person collect, arrange and interpret any information they got on you, to build the psychological profile and track them down. if there is a slightest reason to call police, it's your best bet to use professionals, after all, there is no other way facebook gives away the ip addresses, tracking data and beacons on them.

you never know, but psychopaths could be really desperate and infect your computer via innocent looking emails or what not, to get more access to your data, or starting stalking you etc. it's better to be proactive, but not paranoid. you don't have enough time, resources and stamina to dedicate so much of your efforts to fight them back, even with the help of all your friends.

Someone hacked into my girlfriend's page on FB. She did not friend a handful of people she did not know, and about 4 days later on her FB page there is a cell phone photo of a girl around 18-19 in the bathroom, in her underwear taking a self portrait cell phone photo and asking if everyone(who was reading my girlfriend's page) if they liked her new photo?

Now, first, my girlfriend would NEVER do anything like that. And, second, my girlfriend is 55 years old. She reported it to FB and tried to warn all her friends that she had been hacked, and FB locks her out of her own page.

She started a brand new page, but all her friends were on her real page, which FB would not let her in to. Weeks of fighting with FB eventually got her back on her real page, but what a hassle.

You can set up Google Alerts to notify you if anyone creates Facebook or twitter pages, etc with your name or alias. You can't stop people from doing this if they want to badly enough, but you can stay on top of things with Google Alerts.

Contacting the administration of the sites to have these impersonation pages will generally get them suspended until they can verify that you are who you are and they are not, and then the fake page will be removed.

V Laroche wrote: I just ignore them. It's very easy. The effort involved is zero.

If scam "artists" are using your images promising all kinds of things to an unsuspecting person in exchange for money. This could be a problem for you. For instance, they require a deposit for a shoot, they get the money, of coarse you don't show up. Now this photographer is mad at you. Might even take legal action against you. Or they might promise something else that could damage more than your modeling career. The unsuspecting mark might actually run into you and do physical harm to you because in their mind you stole money from them not the scammer.

Not long ago I had the experience of being approached on MM by a "female" model who claimed to lived near me and who pitched me in a series of messages about doing an erotic shoot. It soon became clear HE was someone impersonating a woman, seeking emailed pictures of "sample" images.

V Laroche wrote: I just ignore them. It's very easy. The effort involved is zero.

It's easy to ignore something like that. But the damage that someone can do pretending to be you can be vast. Protecting your name and reputation is important. If someone were out there pretending to be me and posting "work" that was pornographic, crappy quality or even illegal, I'd have a problem ignoring it.

MesmerEyes Photography wrote: If scam "artists" are using your images promising all kinds of things to an unsuspecting person in exchange for money. This could be a problem for you. For instance, they require a deposit for a shoot, they get the money, of coarse you don't show up. Now this photographer is mad at you. Might even take legal action against you. Or they might promise something else that could damage more than your modeling career. The unsuspecting mark might actually run into you and do physical harm to you because in their mind you stole money from them not the scammer.

Just saying.

I am 0% worried about any of those scenarios. How would someone sue me or beat me up if they have no idea who I am and have no way to contact me? If someone is clueless enough to pay a deposit to a complete stranger with no way of knowing who they are, then what reputable photographer would listen to their Picaresque tale of woe? That makes no sense. In any case, I have no cares about this. I no longer feel the need to worry about my reputation, only my personal relationships with others.

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